Learning More About Velvet Rope Private Social Communities with Christopher S. Penn
We are experiencing an evolution as people shift their daily online activities from being primarily on public social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to private communities such as those hosted on Slack and Discord. Not only is this because of growing mistrust in social media but these private communities also provide us the ability to be with others who share similar focus areas (think: Marketing Operations professionals).
To go deeper into this shift, I sat down with Christopher S. Penn, to talk about dark social, these velvet rope communities, measurement options, and which platforms are growing the fastest (Slack or Discord).
After listening to the episode, make sure you connect with Chris:
Website: www.christopherspenn.com
Community: trustinsights.ai/analyticsformarketers
Private Communities Whitepaper: Members Only - The Rise of Private Social Media
And, if you enjoy learning about influencer marketing and dark social, please consider subscribing to the Influencer Impact newsletter and joining our community. Until next time!
What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript likely contains errors and is not a substitute for listening to the podcast.
[Justin Levy 0:01]
Hi, welcome back to the Influencer Impact Podcast. I'm Justin Levy. And today I'm with Christopher Penn. Chris Penn is the co-founder and chief data scientist of trust insights. He's the author of over two dozen marketing books, the co-host of Marketing Over Coffee, which has over 700 episodes and a million downloads the last time I checked, and hundreds of 1000s of people on his newsletter on marketing and AI. How are you today, Chris, after I just had to say all of that,
[Christopher Penn 0:39]
you and I have to say that I'm doing well, thanks for having me.
[Justin Levy 0:42]
And for those that don't know, and don't get to see him on camera, he pretty much just is a hermit and lives in his basement so he can create all this content.
[Christopher Penn 0:52]
It's a crazy world out there.
[Justin Levy 0:54]
And it protects you. So the purpose of today's conversation is really to dive into some research you've done and that's around dark social and private communities and everything around that, that we're seeing a lot of conversations around. So first off, do you think that private communities such as Slack-based communities are synonymous with dark social? Or do you see them different as being different? Or is private communities as part of dark social,
[Christopher Penn 1:30]
Private social media communities are a subset of dark social, dark social media is any social media for which it's not publicly accessible. Or we as marketers cannot get data about it. And so there's sort of, I guess, I would call it three stages in the evolution of social media. There are public social media, which everyone kind of is well aware of starting way back in like 2001, with Friendster and Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, etc. That's public social media and the conversations people have there, then you really saw a burst from like, 2010-ish to 2015-ish, have messaging, right.
So, WhatsApp, WeChat, Kik, Line, Telegram, all the SMS messages, group texts, and you have all these people who are having conversations in private groups, where there's no search engines, no visibility, nothing, it's invitation only. And that was really the first big dark social movement where you have a bunch of stuff happening and like, at the time, Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp, and indirect messages where you can't see what other people are talking about. And then, from about 2013, Nichelle 2014 2015 onwards, you today, you have this sort of hybrid, which we call private social media communities.
These are things like Slack, Discord, and Telegram, where the public can find their way into these, we call them velvet rope communities, you can join Slack and join a Discord. There are some that are clearly invitation only, and there are others that are our public open to the public. But we as marketers still can't see into them, we can't get data, we can't track what's being shared what's being talked about. And so it's kind of this middle ground where people can have those conversations out of the watchful eye of a variety of algorithms and, and, you know, search engines and things like that.
[Justin Levy 3:26]
Now, if you are with these private communities, if you are behind this velvet rope, how, as a marketer, can you actually measure your efforts? You know, you have to report to your VP or your CMO? or what have you, the reason why you're spending the time in these, if you're doing it for business, if you're doing it for personal reasons, obviously, that's for your personal brand or your interest. But if you're doing it on behalf of work, how do you go about measuring that? It depends
[Christopher Penn 3:58]
On the kind of community if it's a customer community, then you obviously measure with things like retention rates, customer surveys, customer advisory board, the qualitative feedback you get from customers about the value of the community, if you're using it for marketing, for acquisition and engagement, there's a couple of different ways you can do that. One is for the stuff that you post within these communities. Definitely, you should be doing the basics like putting tracking codes on links that you share in and community.
So like, for example, in the analytics for marketers slack, which is the Slack community that my company runs. Anytime I share a link, put Google Analytics tracking codes on it so that I know it's coming from slack. And so, at the very least, for anything that's coming through that we can measure that. The second thing is for any kind of sales input, form-filled conversation with a sales rep. One of the things to the easiest questions to ask is: What made you come in today or what made you fill out the form today? And if your private social media community that you're running If you're running or you have a heavy hand participating in the answers, then you know that is helping to persuade people.
A third thing to look at is branded organic search. For example, how often do people search for Trust Insights? Or Christopher Penn? Or Justin Levy or Demandbase? And do you see grant organic search rising commensurate to the level of effort you're putting into community, there's a statistical technique called propensity score model, which is kind of like retroactive AB testing, where if you have a whole period of time before the community, and you have a shorter period time, after the community, the software will try and match up similar kinds of days, you d into your email campaigns and pay per click campaigns, and whatever is left, you can say we can attribute this to the community that was running in this time period, that was not running in this huge other time period.
And then, you know, the fourth way is some of the community metrics themselves. So things like number of active users and things. And depending on the kind of community and the access you, you have to the data, you can look like if you're doing Account Based Marketing, you know, what percentage of people in the community who are participating are from company domains that you actually care about or otherwise identified in your CRM. So there's a whole bucket of different measures that you can use with a little bit of math to make that determination that yeah, this community is helping with acquisition or helping with engagement or possibly even helping with conversion.
[Justin Levy 6:32]
One of the areas that you touched on as for a metric is self-attribution right on the form, being able to input where this came from this activity. I have my own feeling. And I know many disagree with me that are looking into this, you know, dark social efforts and communities. I vehemently don't think that it scales. So for smaller companies, that's great. You can have your form in I know of one company chili Piper, who actually has it as a required field to say on their forum, where did you hear about us? So it's forced, as you start to scale, and I'd love to hear your thoughts, as you start to scale into a mid sized company to an enterprise, that almost becomes impossible. So if, for example, you have 10, different slack communities that you're part of, and you have 75 employees that are part of that, if you have a 5000 person company, that, at least in my opinion, becomes very difficult to set up, say Salesforce, and, you know, campaigns and whatnot to track that. Do you agree? Or am I just crazy?
[Christopher Penn 7:53]
I think the issue there is, you don't have good marketing, measurement governance to get begin with, right if that's the scenario that you're putting out in front of somebody, you can say, look, look, you don't have any kind of discipline about tracking stuff, every person can learn how to use Google's UTM tracking codes, right? That is not super complicated technology. And so at least for the things that you're sharing yourself, you should 100% be tracking that. And if you're not, that's a people management problem more than anything else to say, like, Hey, if you want to keep investing your time in the workday, doing community management, you need to adhere to the governance around tracking so that we can continue to justify the expenditure in it. If we don't have that data, we can't make a case for why you should continue doing this. Now,
[Justin Levy 8:49]
there was a study that was done by the Global Web Index, and Reddit. And part of what they found was that 66% of the respondents said that they increase their time on BS private communities. And this was really in the thick of the pandemic, but it was because they wanted to be with people that look like them, right? If you're a MOPs, you want to be with other individuals that were in mops as well, because that's where you get your recommendations now more than say, Google or organic social. With that said, what private communities do you see are growing the fastest? Whether that is slack base, desktop, Discord, Telegram, what have you? Which ones are grown the fastest? And is there a reason why
[Christopher Penn 9:44]
Discord is the fastest-growing of the communities. We look at search data for the number of people linking to these private social media communities because many of the ones that are open to the public have links on public websites, and we see anywhere from 1000s to 10s. 10s of 1000s of these new discord servers popping up every single month. So it is it is the fastest growing.
The second fastest growing is Telegram, actually Telegram particularly overseas. outside the USA, which is where I'm based, it is growing you're at, they're adding hundreds to 1000s of communities every single month, Slack is number three. And then Signal is number four.
The reason for Discord growth is several fold one, its heritage started in gaming. And so as you have a whole generation of especially kids, that that grew up with discord, because it's been around since 2014. So it's about eight years old. Now. You have some of those, you know, teens and college gamers. They're now in the workforce. They're now professionals in the workforce. And so they're used to that environment. Second, the monetization model and discord makes it easy for communities to spring up their slack, for example, has a 90-day retention period unless you pay the $8 per user per month, you lose history, after 90 days, a Discord server you can set up at a level zero server, you still get to keep all your messages and stuff like that, like you can't have certain fringe benefits like server banners and custom emoji and stuff like that. But even the level one server which is you will be paying, I will say like $99 a year for you would definitely get some of those features. And then the popular communities go all the way up to level three, which is you're spending about $500 a year. Now think about that slack, you know, the investment for a Slack community of say 1000 is $8,000 a month, right and for the same size community on Discord be $500 for the year. So clearly for people who want to build a larger community, Discord is the place to do it. The other thing is that the community management features and the amenities you can build customized third-party add-ons for discord are gigantic compared to slack. You can do watch parties have all sorts of bots, games, you know, live concerts, all sorts of crazy stuff that granted is very entertainment based but allows for good community management principles to be applied. Again, you can do some of these in Slack, but not nearly as many. We also just see a major age difference, right?
When we ran a survey, we ran a representative survey to the US population, about 2000 respondents and the number of people who are familiar with discord and use it was substantially higher for people under the age of 35. Whereas other social networks and public social is still where people over the age of 35 spent the time. So again, as this chunk of the workforce matures and starts using more and more tools in the workplace. You know, discourse certainly is it. And the last one is, despite everyone's wishes to the contrary, mine included, we are still in the middle of not one but three pandemics. So as as a result of this, we have to you know, we're seeing people still being cautious and still preferring virtual environments for some activities. And there's nothing wrong with that. And Discord is the platform of choice for that.
[Justin Levy 13:20]
Do you see, you know, you talked about discord started in is even still with younger, you know, the younger, aged individuals who are now mature and into work and professionals and decision-makers and what have you. If you were kind of laying out the recommendations right now, and you are going to launch, say a business-focused community. Would that be, say slack right now, because you may already have a well established, older demographic. Versus if you were starting a new one with that younger demographic, it would be discord like where would you make that recommendation between and I know there's telegram and these other ones. But you have these two options, say between discord and slack discord being the fastest growing but slack being the most established for business professionals?
[Christopher Penn 14:26]
It depends on your audience, right. The thing that I would suggest doing is running an email survey to your mailing list and saying of these private social media communities, where do you spend your time right now? And then look at the roadmap of these communities and see where they're going.
Slack is obviously owned by a much larger company now Salesforce, and it's not really clear which direction they're taking it in. Right? Because Salesforce had its own community management tool called chatter that was really meant for internal and companies and If it really obviously didn't do terribly well compared to Slack, but we don't know where Salesforce is taking this thing, we are pretty clear with discord. You know, they're still an independent company, it would not surprise me, I'm honestly surprised has not happened yet that Microsoft has not bought it. Because it would be a natural fit for the Xbox gaming community to just be integrated in. But you know, who knows? That said, Discord, keeps leaning more and more heavily into community-level stuff. So Slack is almost trying it with a lot of the recent feature announcements, I think slack is trying to operate as sort of a hybrid workspace like you know, better integration with Office software and things like that.
Discord is all about, like, you're gonna come here and have fun. And so part of the decision is, who is your audience? Where do they spend your time, their time? What are your plans for the community? Like? Do you plan on doing bunches of different community management activities like watch parties and things even in a b2b context? You know, having watched parties, maybe not a popular movies, but have sessions from conferences that are on YouTube, and having people chime into the chat? It's easier to do in discord than it is on Slack? And certainly, the technology is there. So it depends on your goals to what are your goals for the community? And how much of a learning curve and how much how much of it is going to be an eight yeah, one more thing for people to do. This is the problem with a lot of new entrants to the marketplace is like yeah, it's yet another thing you need to install.
Whereas if your audience is already on Slack, or your audience is already on Discord, that should be a little bit easier. I personally would lean towards discord. If I was starting a brand new community today on my own, I would personally lean towards discord partly for the pricing model, because you get all the features for much, much less than you do for slack. And also for all the community management features because you can do just about anything.
One of the most fascinating Discord communities I'm a member of as Joe Pulizzi is the tilt. It's part of his content creators. Community. And he's integrated Discord with his creator tokens. So if you hold a certain amount of his cryptocurrency, there are certain channels in the discord that you get access to, you know, higher and higher levels of access based on how much you own of this thing. It's not a great stretch of the imagination to see that you could build a bot for, you know, tiers of customers that you have, like, hey, our, our our monthly retainer customers go in this channel, our project customers go in this channel, everybody else here, and then you do drops of higher value stuff like hey, here's some custom stuff just for our very best customers.
[Justin Levy 17:46]
When we were having a conversation a few weeks ago, I think it was we're talking about why we both believe that private communities and that being a subset of dark social, but Dark Social really kind of been a new term that's been around for a while in reality, but private communities why we both felt that it was the early entrance, similar to what organic social was 15 years ago or something. And that's something that you and I both have been around since the beginning. How do you recommend and I know it's based on your goals and your community and things of that nature. But if you want to have that first-mover advantage and be an early entrant? Are there certain things that you recommend that either a company does that's looking to get involved? Or say an individual that's trying to launch something that's aligned with their personal brand or their company?
[Christopher Penn 18:51]
Yeah, number one, do your homework. Go to different existing private social media communities on the different platforms, join them, and see how they operate? See what people do? See what some of the best practices are? Things that get people to engage. So that'd be my first suggestion and spend a few weeks maybe a couple of months in all these different servers looking to see how do people how do people keep their communities engaged. Second thing is, if you don't, you might not want to build your own, right, just like podcasts, you might not want to build your own.
If there's a lot of noise in that space already. You might be better off leveraging an existing community or, you know, depending on your budget, just sponsoring a community outright if one already exists, acquire it, you know, they've done the work already of building the community. You can you can simply you know, slap your brand on it with it with enough money.
And then if you're going to build a community, the big things to look at is how do you do proper community management? How do you run a community that as healthy that is growing that is that people want to be part of that people are willing to carve out time in their day for because, as with everything in marketing, we are competing against the news and the politicians and Netflix and Hulu and Disney plus. And, you know, in every person's pocket who owns a smartphone, there's a universe of better entertainment options than marketing.
So there has to be a reason why people would want to hang out in your community, what's the value proposition for analytics for marketers, with our with our Slack community, our primary user story that we know that we put when we put ourselves in the shoes of the customer who's in there is as a marker, I need a place that where I can ask questions without feeling stupid or exposing to my boss that I don't know what I'm doing with this thing. Right. So people are we greet people. Yeah, this is private. We're not copy-pasting this anywhere else in the internet's Google can't see in here. There's no algorithm tracking you. There's no nobody trying to sell ads to you. This is a safe space, where if you got a question like has this a dumb question, go ahead and ask him I had a conversation. Last night, somebody said, I don't know if this is the right place to place to put this and I feel kind of dumb asking this question. But then they had this question about a certain type of data. Like that's not a dumb question. The tool that you're you're talking about that is not giving you intelligent answers. The reason for it is the data is being partially suppressed by Google, so you will not see it and you're not doing anything wrong. But this person felt safe enough, in this private community to ask that question. One of the biggest things that defines the success of a community of psychological safety, how safe do people feel in that community, where they can be more of themselves, where they can ask questions, where they can not feel like they're about to get attacked. I mean, when you look at what's public, social media has become public.
Social media has become a performative environment where you do stuff to please the algorithm, you'll get more clicks, cry, and on your LinkedIn profile, or whatever. And it's not a place where you're having as many conversations because you're constantly trying to be the dancing monkey for somebody else's AI. And so with private social media communities, those algorithms don't exist. They're not in there. There it's just a chronological timeline, you don't get brownie points for putting up provocative posts. In fact, people will probably, maybe don't post that. Or the better committees have a spam channel, again, if you want to just post random crap, just post random crap in the spam channel. But that was that'd be kind of the things I would be thinking about.
[Justin Levy 22:47]
One of the things you said about kind of monitoring these communities and seeing how they're coming. If you're the community manager, seeing how that community grows, that you're overseen, it's it's kind of funny, because one of the ones that I oversee, it's made up of senior executives, within B2B companies.
I'm sure there's some B2C folks, but mostly B2B. And, you know, for the longest time when we first launched this, you know, I'm putting up questions of the day, which is very natural in many of these communities. But they were of the more serious type, right? Senior executives figure and what are their thoughts on their marketing budget? Or what are their 2023 revenue plans or something like that?
One day, because of a discussion we got into in your community, on whether pineapple should be on pizza, either now, next day, went in hat, put that in as the question of the day, and it filled with engagement. So then I took a step back, and I thought to myself, like you said, putting myself in their shoes. The last thing they probably want to talk about is the stuff that they sit in meetings all day long about.
So for the most part, all of my kind of questions of the day lately, have been light-hearted commentary. Yesterday, I asked what their favorite type of French Fry was curly fries, steak, fry, steak, fruits, whatever, once again, filled with commentary and people almost having debates with each other, like pictures of the proper steak-frites or something like that. And it was an in a way of revelation to me, because that's what these individuals who are senior executives in sales or marketing, it's that that outlet it seems for them, right It's not they're super serious meetings all the time. It's this kind of fun thing that they can jump into and give a give a kind of offhanded answer to. So and a buddy of ours, Jay Baer is in there right now. And he's doing some series for us. And one of the things he decided to do, because he has a storage container full of them now is give away a bottle of tequila for the best answer to his question. So he had come to me and said, Hey, listen, do you? Is this okay? I said, Yeah, sure, whatever. And this was the first week that he did it. And of course, once again, it he asked a compelling question that had to do with sales. But it had that little unique hook to it, no one else in any communities given out to Keilah, like, especially your executives.
So I love what you say there because it is, you know, I not that skill by any stretch on analytics. And besides, you know, you and Katie and John and other folks being friends of mine, I get a lot of value out of your community. Because the stuff not all of it's applicable to me, but the stuff that is I take I take a lot of value from it. And then I can have more intelligent conversations internally with the folks at our company that oversee that stuff. And I know what's gonna ask for a little more intelligently.
[Christopher Penn 26:36]
Yep, you got to follow the three E's, entertain, engage or educate. When you're doing community management, you've got to be doing at least one of those all the time. Preferably, you know, like, the song goes, two out of three ain't bad. And if you could do all three, great, but to your point about the tequila stuff, and the, you know, the pineapple on pizza stuff. The thing about community management is just that it's, we're all people, we're all human beings at the end of the day, so of course, things are going to resonate, like hey, do you like the new Taylor Swift album? Yes or no, that's going to resonate with people. They may not like it like depends on your community. But for sure, it's going to resonate. If you were to ask people about their golf game and a roomful of senior executives, guess what, you're going to have a lot of engagement like it, what's the worst shot you've ever made? In golf, like, oh, yeah, that time I actually let go of the club while I was swinging and being to my beans being the caddy, right? We're still human, these are still just human beings. And that can be very difficult for novice community managers, particularly if they are marketers, or even worse salespeople, because they don't see the connection between just doing fun stuff and supporting the brand and driving sales. Like, you know, you have to create that feeling of emotional and psychological safety first, before you can ask for anything. And again, that's something that a lot of folks don't understand about community management. And it's, it's scary. Because, again, if you've got stakeholders who think on very short timeframes, right, community management is a long game, it is it is a years long game. If they're thinking I gotta make my numbers by next quarter, they're in the wrong place.
[Justin Levy 28:29]
As we record this, it's a couple of days away from being November of 2022. So as you look forward, you just did this white paper on dark social well act on private communities on velvet rope communities. As you look into 2023, you know, a lot of us are starting to get asked our predictions, and you start to see those articles pour out. What do you see if you had to kind of stake some claims in 2023 when it comes to private communities?
[Christopher Penn 29:04]
I'm glad you I'm glad to timebox that because I got a whole bunch of predictions that don't fit in that box that nobody wants to. The track the growth trend is still extremely strong in private social media communities. As the last time we looked discord had established 70,000 new communities in a month, which is just a bogglingly large number.
The public social media platforms are in worse shape than ever right? Again, as we're recording this Twitter has just undergone a massive amount of management change and stuff. I've actually a friend of mine, a high school friend of mine was their general counsel of the head of the trust and safety team. And on the day of the management changeover they were let go like letting go of your top lawyer and trust and safety person seems like seems like bad change management maybe shouldn't label executives least for a little while. Um, but combine that with an ever more toxic public debate public discourse, public social media is not a place where people enjoy spending time, right?
It's a place that you go because you're kind of used to going there. But it's kind of like going to a dirty bar, like, yeah, you have fond memories, that bar, maybe you met your significant other there, but you're like, yeah, do I really want to be here. And as we become more insular and polarize in our habits, anyway, the appeal of private social media communities where we can be around people that we are more agreeable with, continues to increase, right? We see a lot of your particularly the political space, a lot of very pointed, private, social, public, public, facing platforms around a certain political point of view that people are flocking to, because they want more of their echo chamber, right. And this is not any one particular position. This is in general, people want more of their echo chamber.
And so private social media communities fit that bill perfectly, here's a community you can be and where people are just like you, now we can have a debate separately about whether that's good for society as a whole. But from a marketing perspective, it's, it's marketing gold, because here's a community if you're building this community, here's a community of people who are interested in your products and services, or at least the very least your industry. And you don't have to go out and figure out where they are. Because as long as you create a community that's valuable as people invite their colleagues and friends, you grow that community and you also have the ability to to do essentially an ongoing focus group.
So I think the the the near term future of private social media communities remain strong, again, dependent on who, who owns these services, because obviously, you know, a management change can can have dramatic effects on any community, public, social media continues to sort of devolve into into an even bigger sewer. But also private communities and your email list of the things you own to you know, obviously you don't own the underlying service with something like discord but you do run the community, there's not a discord employees is in there with you. Whereas you don't own or have control over your Facebook feed or your LinkedIn feed or things like that. And so, for marketers, the as they're thinking about how do we attract and retain more of our audience retain our audience's attention? Private communities and email marketing are your two last bastions against somebody else's our AI.
[Justin Levy 32:38]
So as we wrap up, two final questions for you. One, who would you recommend we bring on to the podcast that aligns with influencer marketing or private communities or dark social?
[Christopher Penn 32:54]
The number one person that I think of when I think about influencer marketing is Ashley Zeckmen. Over at Onalytica, she and I have had some very interesting conversations particularly about the measurement of influence, there's going to be some big, big changes in influencer measurement in the next few months. Because one of the things that every influencer marketing tool that I know of over relies on Twitter data, and if there are major changes happening at Twitter, there will be major changes to that data set, regardless of whether the company does anything different, just the population, the demographic will change. And so that as the data source may become less reliable, so I think you know, actually be a good person to talk to you about other ways to manage influence.
[Justin Levy 33:40]
And where can people find you on the internet? Besides everywhere, because you are everywhere,
[Christopher Penn 33:48]
Uou can find the company at trustinsights.ai. But if you want to see an example of a private social media community in action, go to trustinsights.ai/analyticsformarketers, all one word, all lowercase, and you can see our Slack group and get a sense for how we run our community. And then, you know, stay tuned, we're going to be trying some even more new things in the new year.
[Justin Levy 34:10]
Fantastic. Thank you, Chris, for coming on. It's always a pleasure to get down, get to sit down and talk to you. Mainly because you're the smartest human being that's involved in my life.
[Christopher Penn 34:22]
Thank you for having me.
